Follow these simple, legal, steps to get 13 months of Office 365 Home or Personal for less than what Microsoft charges for just a year.

Some readers seem to doubt renewing separately from Microsoft is possible or even allowed. It’s definitely possible and permitted. Microsoft doesn’t make it obvious that customers can buy elsewhere because they make a lot of extra profit from direct purchases and renewals.

You do NOT have to renew or buy Office 365 direct with Microsoft. The worst option for customers is auto-renewal or buying direct from Microsoft. The company would like you to renew direct because they make the most profit that way.

Office 365 can be extended at any time. An Office 365 plan can extend up to five years ahead. It’s definitely permitted to renew well before the current expiry and extend a subscription. If you see a good deal on your Office 365, consider buying it and ‘pushing out’ the expiry date.

For example, it’s January and your Office 365 expires on 1 July. You can buy an Office 365 pack in January, apply it to your subscription right away and your expiry will extend to July of the following year (i.e. 18 months). Maybe you see a good price for Office 365 or you’re going away and don’t want the hassle of renewing.

Whatever the reason, you can buy a matching Office 365 pack, add it to your current subscription at any time. It’s cheaper and easy, here’s now in 6 simple steps.

1. Check your Office 365 details

It’s important that you buy the same Office 365 plan to extend your subscription.

Buy Office 365 Home to extend a Home plan. Buy Office 365 Personal to extend a Personal plan. Sounds obvious but we’ve heard from a few people who’ve bought the wrong Office 365 plan and hilarity trouble ensues.

Any reputable software retailer has Office 365 packs sold either as physical product or online. Either way you get a unique 25 character product key. Add that product key to your Office 365 account and your subscription will be extended.

Often there’s a price difference between the online and physical options. Bizarrely, the physical ‘key card’ is sometimes cheaper than the online despite the post/shipping costs.

For this example, we’ll use Amazon USA. They usually have good prices on standard items like Office 365. Other online and in-store retailers are available.

It doesn’t matter which store you use, the Office 365 product is exactly the same no matter what a salesperson or promotion might suggest.

Go for the cheapest (legal) price you can find.

3. Make the correct, cheapest choice

Here’s the current Amazon page for Office 365 Home with $20 off (that’s a common discount level) There are two choices to make; Platform and Edition.

Platform

Three choices about how you get the Office 365 product key.

Auto-Renewing Subscription – The retailer charges full price and will automatically renew the subscription again when near expiry. This is the same rip-off as Microsoft’s auto-renewal/recurring billing except the high price purchase and renewal is done by the retailer except Microsoft directly.

Download – the product key is displayed on the screen. It can be copied into your Office 365 account (see below). To make it even simpler, retailers can transfer your purchase/product key to your Office 365 account. Below we’ll show how that works.

Key Card – a little cardboard pack containing the 25 character product key. Type the code into a web page at your Office 365 account. Time consuming both typing and waiting for snail mail. However occasionally, the key card is cheaper than download which makes no economic sense. Key card is also a viable gift option.

No disk – none of these options includes a DVD install disk. Whichever way you buy Office 365, the software is downloaded from Microsoft.

Edition

Choose the Office 365 plan that applies to you.

Home – Office 365 benefits for six users.

Personal – for one person

Business Premium – a business plan which includes Exchange Server hosting for one person

Sales Tax

Even though it’s a digital product, Amazon charges sales tax according to the ‘Deliver to’ address for the order. Savvy US customers can tweak the delivery address to a no sales tax state (like Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon) to save a little money. See Save sales tax on Office 365 and more

Choose or confirm your Office 365 login

Enter your product key

If you’ve bought a physical key card or got an online product key that’s not passed automatically from the retailer. Type or paste in the 25 character product key.

If the retailer has passed along the purchase details (e.g. the Continue to Office.com button on Amazon) then this step isn’t necessary.

6. Recurring billing aka Renewal Rip-off

Next Microsoft offers the choice of automatic renewals for future years. This choice defaults ON because it’s more profitable for Microsoft.

Take advantage of auto-renewal bonus

Usually, Microsoft offers an incentive to choose auto-renewal. As you can see above, they offer an extra month on the year subscription if you turn on automatic renewal.

Office Watch has said many times; take advantage of the Office 365 extra month offer and still pay less for Office 365. Turn on ‘Recurring Billing’ to get the extra month but make sure you separately extend/renew Office 365 before the expiry date. That gives you 13 months for the discounted cost of a year without paying more than you have to.

Get Office software

Finally, if you’re new to Office 365, download the software for Windows or Mac.